One convert at a time

One Convert at a time

The atrocious attitude towards the environmental and ecology is my one soar point about Georgia (okay there may be a few more), and when the rare opportunity comes up when someone actually asks your opinion about how Georgia could do better, I usually try to ease into that issue.

My favorite story: I was leaving Racha after being there a week, and we gave a lift to one of my host's relatives from the same village. This guy couldn't stand that we had two bags of trash in the trunk of the Niva, so even before we had left HIS OWN VILLAGE, he was bugging my host to pull over and toss the trash by the side of the road. As chance would have it, my host and I had been discussing ecological attitudes and cultural consciousness just the day before, so I kept my mouth shut to see what would happen. My friend ignored the requests until after about the tenth comment when he finally said, "Well, Joni is kind of an environmentalist." I had kept my mouth shut the whole time, hoping that my host wouldn't give in. But now this relative turned to me with an accusatory air and said, "So what would you do with the trash?" as if this were the most impossible question to answer. I kind of shrugged and said simply, "This is your Land, isn't it beautiful?" He looked at me sideways and grunted, ending our conversation. Later, we were looking for a trashcan down in the valley. We pulled over to a little roadside stand, and my host leaned out and asked, 'Excuse me, where can we find a trashcan?' An elderly lady came out of her stand and hobbled over to the car with a 'pleased-to-be-of-service' smile on her face. She said, "Oh that's easy. You drive straight down this road here, and after you go around the next bend, you'll see a pull-out. You stop there, and you can throw everything right over the bank into the river!" I suppressed any reaction, and let the Georgians go for it. My host said, "in the river?!" "Yeah," she repeated, "right in the river, it's just up the road after you go around the bend." We left. Punchline: The trash-phobic relative turned to me and said with genuine incredulity, "can you believe these people? Trash in the river!"

Everyone is a potential convert!
John